Census time!

[jducoeur]

After years of argument about it, there's something weirdly exciting about actually filling in the stupid form, and seeing what it wound up looking like. (This gets sadder as I go along.)

PSA: fill it in. No, really -- this is how congress-critters and electoral-college votes get allocated. If you want your state to be properly represented, it's really important, even if the bastards overseeing it are diabolically evil. Refusing to fill it in because of that evil is basically cutting off your nose to spite your face -- they would be overjoyed to be able to report that Massachusetts turns out to not have so many people, so we're taking away one of your representatives now.

First impression, as I type the URL: Google is prompting me with "my2020census.gove". Uh-oh. That smells like some identity-fraud scammers may be poisoning the system and trying to divert people into a fake form.

I love the fact that you first get (paraphrasing) a "How many people will be in your household on April 1?" page. Then you get "Please list all the people in your household on April 1". Then you get "No, really -- think about it. Are there going to be more people in your household on April 1?". It does show that somebody in the form's design understands humans.

Curious that they care about whether we have a mortgage.

On the one hand, I'm glad that they explicitly acknowledge that same-sex partnership is a thing. OTOH, I'm cranky that they call it out as different from opposite-sex.

Unsurprisingly, they try very hard to draw a rigid "Male or Female", on strict biological lines. No acknowledgement of the occasional intersex "it's complicated" situations.

Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me -- they want me to not only say "White", but specify my national origins as well. I might just say "Mutt". Yeah, did so. (Seriously, even if I was confident where all my ancestors came from, it's certainly multiple countries. Stupid, stupid question.)

And I'm morbidly curious about the public justification for calling Hispanic out as a separate race (indeed, its own separate pathway from all other races), when Italian explicitly isn't. I mean, yes, the reason is raw nativist racism and an attempt at government-led terrorism of the Hispanic community, but I don't actually know what the public window-dressing for it is. It's even more nakedly offensive than I had expected.

Hah! You get to the end, and the final question is essentially, "No, really -- think about it one more time. Do some of those people you previously listed in this household actually live somewhere else?" (Actually, that last one may be a devious trick to prevent prison inmates from getting counted at all, by mucking up the accounting. Sobering possibility, that.)

Comments

[mermaidlady]

I was annoyed at the binary male or female option, but I was livid at the racial origins question. The first thing I thought was "American". My family has been born in this country for 3 generations. We lost any hyphen a long time ago.

newman first said "Mountain gorilla", but changed it to "New Yorker". I thought about "Eastern European", rather than "Lithuanian, Prussian, German, and Austrian/Galician/Polish (depending on the year)", but grimly ended up saying "Jewish".

[lauradi7dw]

The white purity test has been much discussed since it was thought of, but unlike the Trump's planned citizenship test, which was nixed by the courts, apparently it's legal. We haven't received our invitation yet, but I'm planning to put "colonizer" for the kind of white I am.
It's interesting that you mention Italian specifically. I had not realized until I watched Ken Burns's recent series on the history of country music that Johnny Cash's first wife Vivian, who had southern Italian ancestry but was fairly dark-skinned, got a great deal of racist flack from people who were shocked that JC had married a black woman.

The who really lives in your house thing is supposed to be focusing on small children this time. Apparently people have often not listed new babies, and children of parents who have shared custody often are missed because each parent thinks the other one listed them.

My sister was disappointed that there wasn't a question about employment. We have enjoyed seeing the old census records that have such info. My paternal grandmother is listed on the 1920 census as a "looper." It's true (a looper was the person who stitched shut the toes of stockings at a hosiery mill, using a looping machine), but I wonder if the census enumerator had ever heard of it as a job. Still, wrote it down, spelled it right.
Also, what would resistance genealogists do without information like language spoken at home? When the evil Stephen Miller promoted an immigration policy that would exclude everyone who spoke a language other than English, it took people almost no time tracking down his great-grandmother (I think) who was listed on the census as speaking only Yiddish.

[lauradi7dw]

It's been discussed a lot of the Lexington email chat list. Most people put American. One person regretted his decision not to write Slobovian.

[sporky_rat]

I put 'American' for both of us.

My greatgrandparents forgot to put my greatuncle down on the census because he'd been born the day before the census taker got there and was still in the hospital. Grandfather told me that his father was rather flustered and only remembered Grandmother, not Uncle Andrew. Uncle Andrew made money in college doing the job of a census taker and always remembered that story.

[cvirtue]

If I follow the links, I don't see any E as you report.
https://my2020census.gov/login for example.

[writerkit]

Prisons are considered "group quarters" and don't get counted on that form; either the prison fills out a form or a census taker goes to the prison and counts everyone, depending. (Guess what I've been doing for the last month! And I'm most put out that all the hard work we put in is now interrupted at the critical point; this is the time when pretty much my entire job should have been making sure we were contributing as much as we possibly could to the accuracy of the town's count.)

[danabren]

I put "Kurgan", because it's plausible.

[elusiveat]

My first reaction to this:

They *can't* make Hispanic into a race. That will mess up my ability to meaningfully compare 2010 data to 2020 data when doing analysis.

Um, oh right. I guess there are justice issues too.

[jducoeur]

No, no -- when I started typing the URL, *Google* prompted me with the `.gove` version. Which means either that a huge number of people are misspelling it that way, or somebody's playing games with SEO...

[cvirtue]

Ah, I see. Except I don’t, because it didn’t do that when I started typing.

[luscious_purple]

And since many prisons are in rural places, this ends up giving more weight to the rural areas, where non-prisoners are more likely to be more conservative. *sigh*

[jducoeur]

Not terribly surprising -- Google prompts are wildly variable, depending on a bazillion factors. It would be astonishing if the behavior was consistent, but it's mildly concerning that I stumbled across it even once...

[jducoeur]

... wow. That's a detail that hadn't occurred to me, and it's just cynical enough that I could believe someone intended it...

[cvirtue]

I've noticed that if I enter something incorrectly and hit return too fast, it will persist, which is annoying. So if I typed www.dreamwide.org, then that is what will come up once I type up to www.dreamw - it's possible that your .gove is legacy from a mistyping you didn't note at some point in the distant past.

[jducoeur]

Doesn't seem plausible -- it's what I was offered when I had typed approximately "my20". And why would I have typed in the URL for this year's census (which I've never seen before) previously, much less done so incorrectly?

No, this clearly came out of Google's systems. *Why* it came out is extremely hard to have any confidence about, since their algorithms are complex and based on huge amounts of variable data...

[cvirtue]

Hmm, good question.

[hudebnik]

It wouldn't be so bad if the prisoners could vote where they're recorded, but most or all of them can't.

[squirrelitude]

I think it's just that they really, really, really don't want to double-count or miss anybody.

I was annoyed at the gender binary thing too, and the rigid framing of the relationship questions. I think there's a good chance the next one will be better in that regard.

I don't expect the race/ethnicity/origin questions to be much better in a decade, though.